Airport Environmental Monitoring

Application Overview

At an airport when an aircraft is looking to take off or land its important that air traffic control is fully aware of weather conditions at the airport, on the runway surface and in its surroundings so that aircraft can take off and land safely and efficiently. Weather conditions that might affect an aircraft’s take off and landing include snow, sleet, rain, fog, excessive wind and temperature. While all these condition can be monitored using a suitable meteorological instrument, a reliable communications system such as the JetBox 9310 is required to relay this information back to the air traffic control centre with minimal interruption.

The ruggedised compact design makes the JetBox 9300 series suitable to be mounted an outdoor cabinet that is exposed to the most extreme weather conditions. The ultra reliable RISC processor technology provides the stability and reliability required for these networks, and the support for the linux operating system allows data acquisition control and metereological instrument management . The serial device server technology allows for connectivity to the meteorological instruments such as rain gauges, barometers and wind gauges and for that serial communication to be accessed anywhere on the network. The Four Power over Ethernet allow multiple JetBox 9300s to be cascaded and to save on physical media costs, while providing connectivity to IP cameras.

In 2008 the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration ) commissioned Lockheed Martin, a leading systems integrator in aviation technology, to design and build a wide scale deployment of weather monitoring stations using the JetBox 9310 for airports in Alaska, USA. Read more about this case study here:

Design Considerations

• Ruggedised industrial design, wide operating temperature, fanless, dustproof and DIN rail mountable suitable for installation in an outdoor cabinet.
• Super reliable RISC processor with Linux support for customized applications
• RS232/RS422/RS485 serial device server to connect to weather instrumentation that can be accessed remotely.
• For redundant communications suitable interface for WAN communications equipment

Why JetBox 9310

• Ruggedised industrial design, -25degC to 70degC operating temperature, fanless, dustproof and DIN rail mountable suitable for installation in a roadside cabinet with 12-48VDC operating voltage.
• Super reliable and cost effective Atmel RISC based processor that supports Real time Linux for or customized layer 2 real time network connectivity and failover to redundant WAN link
• 2 x RS232 port and 2 RS232/422/485 ports and for connecting to communications equipment and 4 DI + 4DO for connecting to sensors and relays
• 4 x Ethernet (PoE optional) ports for connecting to Ethernet / fiber network, communications equipment and IP cameras if required